Nadaleen Singh

En­tre­pre­neur­ship has no age lim­it, says Ty Richard­son, chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer, YoPro Glob­al. YoPro Glob­al is a so­cial com­mu­ni­ty for grad­u­ates and young pro­fes­sion­als to have a fo­rum to ex­plore ca­reer in­ter­ests, in­ter­act with ex­pe­ri­enced pro­fes­sion­als and find re­sources.

There are es­tab­lished YoPro Glob­al com­mu­ni­ties in coun­tries like Dublin. But Richard­son, 35, has de­cid­ed to ex­pand that com­mu­ni­ty. His tar­get: 75 coun­tries–in­clud­ing T&T– and with a dead­line for com­ple­tion of 78 weeks, Richard­son plans to launch this two-year cam­paign to build the world's first glob­al of­fline so­cial net­work. And he in­tends to start in T&T first.

A Trinida­di­an by birth, Richard­son said it would cost ap­prox­i­mate­ly US$,3900 to build the T&T net­work but this cost would in­crease de­pend­ing on the size of coun­try in which the launch is tak­ing place.

"Here we have put in place a com­mit­tee that will mon­i­tor its growth. Be­cause the events are tick­et­ed, all of the costs are de­ferred in the rev­enue that is brought in. We make rev­enue at the end of the day, then we give a per­cent­age back to the com­mit­tee.

He added that the com­mit­tee is of­fered stock in the glob­al com­pa­ny af­ter five years.

Speak­ing to the Busi­ness Guardian last Wednes­day, Richard­son said en­tre­pre­neur­ship re­quires a deep de­sire to want to start a busi­ness, adding that the ef­fort to build a coun­try's econ­o­my through en­tre­pre­neur­ship must come from the peo­ple and can­not come from the pub­lic sec­tor alone.

Richard­son de­scribes him­self as an "evolv­ing" en­tre­pre­neur.

"En­tre­pre­neur­ship is im­por­tant for a so­ci­ety be­cause it fu­els and fos­ters com­pe­ti­tion. It al­so fos­ters cre­ativ­i­ty and in­no­va­tion. When you have that fos­tered, the con­sumer wins. More com­pe­ti­tion means bet­ter prices, bet­ter pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, greater ef­fi­cien­cy."

With the grow­ing so­cial me­dia net­works, Richard­son said com­pe­ti­tion is stiff. While the tra­di­tion­al LinkedIn and Face­book are its com­pe­ti­tion, YoPro Glob­al is com­pet­ing with every oth­er Web site avail­able to the user. In oth­er words, any net­work that peo­ple be­lieve they can build a com­mu­ni­ty around.

"We ab­solute­ly have com­peti­tors. Even though our mod­el is dif­fer­ent, we are com­pet­ing for eye­balls. We are com­pet­ing for the at­ten­tion span of that in­di­vid­ual who will jump, jump, jump (from Web site to Web site). What we have to do is de­liv­er a mod­el that is ef­fi­cient, ef­fec­tive, fast and gives val­ue right away."